Greene to Screen: (Re)Adapting the Novels of Graham Greene

English writer Graham Greene’s biography reads like the resume of the “most interesting man in the world” from the Dos Equis beer ad campaign: in a life spanning the 20th Century (1904-1991), he was a best-selling novelist, a fire warden during the London Blitz, and then a foreign correspondent/British spy in Africa and Asia (and he enjoyed his share of scandalous love affairs to boot). All of which made for great books, 26 novels in all between 1929 and 1988, not to mention several collections of short stories, 4 autobiographical works, 4 travel books, and more than a dozen stage plays. Because they were so popular, many were made into Hollywood films, some more than once. We’ll focus on 3 better-known novels -- Brighton Rock, The End of the Affair, and The Quiet American—and on cinematic adaptions of them (each has been adapted twice), and student research projects will consider formal elements of each version (differences between textual and cinematic manifestations, or between different cinematic interpretations) but also cultural dimensions (that is to say, the ways each version is a product of its age).

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